This remake of Halloween (1984) brightens the original’s gloomy tone with larger, redrawn illustrations featuring lots of happy-looking children and the occasional, not-particularly-scary, witch or ghost, paired to such reassuring lines as “today [skeletons] are used to scare people and have fun,” and “weird and scary stories are enjoyed by all.” Rewriting the text and adding some detail, Gibbons fills in the holiday’s past, but focuses most closely on how it is celebrated today, adding warnings (not in the previous edition) that pumpkin-carving and trick-or-treating should only be done with parental assistance. Though this holiday standard has never gone out of print, there is enough new and recast material here to make it a treat, rather than a trick, even for libraries that just bought fresh copies of the old edition. (Picture book/nonfiction. 6-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2002
ISBN: 0-8234-1758-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A frankenfailure.
A lonely middle schooler literally makes a friend.
Watkins pairs miserable young Angus with Frank, a science-class frog who, upon being taken home for the weekend, dies on the family dinner table. Angus gets to work, and next morning Frank wakes up with a bolt through his neck…and a grouchy disposition: “You’ve brought me back, but who gave you permission? / My body was old, I’d lost most of my vision. / Now everything hurts even more than it did. / I was not in the mood to wake up to you, kid.” Still, Frank agrees to stick around as a permanent houseguest (being apparently unmissed back at school), and the stage is set for a final family gathering featuring a grown-up Angus and another frog topped (natch) by a tall hairpiece with a wavy white stripe. Readers who sucked up Giracula (2019) and found it wanting aren’t going to leap to embrace this second nonsensical, poorly written outing either, Watkins having forcibly wrenched many of the lines into verses: “The laughter started at table five, / And reached poor Angus, who started to cry. / His parents were wrong—this school was no different / Than those in the previous cities he’d lived in.” Angus and his parents register as White, but in his cartoon illustrations, Tuchman does vary skin tones slightly in class and crowd scenes. (This book was reviewed digitally with 11-by-18-inch double-page spreads viewed at 77 % of actual size.)
A frankenfailure. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-943978-51-9
Page Count: 36
Publisher: Persnickety Press
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Tidings of comfort and joy laid on with a trowel but not much regard for texts or traditions.
A version of the Nativity story with 10 narrative or musical sound clips followed by abbreviated Bible stories and devotional thoughts for each day of Advent.
Drawn from Lloyd-Jones’ The Jesus Storybook Bible (2007) with some anonymous interstitial text, the stories begin with a young girl “minding her own business” until Gabriel drops in to give her the heads-up: “He’s the One! He’s the Rescuer!” In Jago’s harmonious, cleanly drawn cartoon illustrations, most of the human characters have brown skin in a variety of shades, including (eventually) a brown-skinned baby Jesus, whose head is topped with tight, black curls. The familiar tale continues up to the appearance of “three clever men” from the East (one cued as East Asian with stereotypical Fu Manchu facial hair) in Bethlehem. It is punctuated with pressure-sensitive spots that each activate 15 to 20 seconds of either a well-known Christmas hymn or a reading by David Suchet in a plummy British accent. Twenty-four shorter daily episodes, mostly Old Testament passages with the gory bits left out, follow to offer (purported) prefigurations of God’s “Secret Rescue Plan” as revealed in the New. These range from a massacre-free version of Joshua’s entry into Jericho and (wait for it) “Daniel and the Scary Sleepover” to the parting of the Red Sea, which is incorrectly identified as the origin of Passover.
Tidings of comfort and joy laid on with a trowel but not much regard for texts or traditions. (Novelty/religion. 6-8)Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-310-76990-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: Zonderkidz
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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